Seven Kinds of Hell (3 page)

I shuddered. An orgasmic surge tore through my body. I felt the confinement of flesh fall away, and a strong, sure connection with the universe seized me. It was coupled with an equally foreign feeling of strength, and suddenly the men before me, between punches two and three, sloooowed and stopped.

Two thoughts struggled to make themselves known in the tumultuous rush of emotions and sensations.

One: The energy drinks and vodka had definitely caught up with me. I was unhinged with power and, oddly, goodness.

Two: If I’d once been labeled a “troubled child,” trouble was calling me, louder and more comprehensively than ever before.

I was going to stop this.

I could smell the sweat on each of the men, scents as individual as the men themselves. The dissipating odor of pepper spray tingled and burned. I could practically taste the blood as it streamed from the prone man; its molecules dancing, ruby-luminous and hypnotic. I could hear heavy breathing and heartbeats, crickets from an empty lot down the street, a radio from a car a mile away.

And the moon, oh, the moon. The cold silver light suffused my veins, animating me, making me magic.

Time snapped back into its groove, but the men did not continue the beating. The idea of the curb—so vivid in my mind, as if a direct link from them—faded. They turned away from their victim and froze.

They were staring at me. I was growling.

It was not the noise of a small woman frustrated with the unfairness of the universe. Not a personal, muffled noise of determination or resistance. It was animal violence, loud and warning. The louder it got, the more I felt it and the strength,
omigod,
the
power
…

I stepped forward, and found myself hindered, tangled in my clothing. Nightmarishly, I couldn’t make my hands pull at my jeans.

I had paws.

A distant part of me wanted to stop, but I didn’t. It felt too…right.

Instinct drove me now; if I had paws, I had claws. I had a mouthful of teeth. I snapped and tore at the fabric. My legs—and tail—were freed.

With the moon singing in my blood, power coursing through me, a lifetime of unfairness and fear falling away, I had one objective:
fix this.

There was one other thought in a corner of my brain:

What the fuck was in that Red Bull cocktail anyway?

I turned back to the men, who were still staring when they should have been running. Three long, leaping paces, and I was on them.

Although I felt entirely capable of tearing their throats out, something kept me from doing so. An impulse suggested they weren’t worthy of that kind of punishment. My intervention would make them reconsider their role in the world and their all-too-willing use of violence.

How could I have known that?

I shook one by the scruff, then nipped at the other one, almost playfully, savoring their fear, enjoying my power. If it was a hallucination, it was a good one. I’d willingly pay six or seven hangovers for that sensation again.

The first two ran. The other remained, stunned.

I didn’t feel the same urge to limit violence with him. I felt a compulsion, a need to
end
him. A natural urge, and unnatural.

I hurled myself at him, my soul blazing with its righteous mania. I clamped onto his shoulder with my teeth, reveling in his screams. His blood was ambrosial and…wrong. The taste of his wrongness told me I had been correct in my assessment. He needed to go.

Instincts ablaze, I should have anticipated he wouldn’t run away. I should have anticipated the response, a yank on my clothing and the brick upside my head.

I fell, stunned, a cathedral landing on top of my skull. Yet the compulsion to attack remained.

I struggled up, shaking my head, and saw him heading around a corner. To a car, I knew, somehow. I tried to run, but tangled up in my clothing, I stumbled, landing hard, skidding on my chin.

I saw stars. I passed out, and awoke with my clothes knotted around me, twisted, torn, and dirty. The young man who’d been the victim of the attack was sitting up, gingerly dabbing at his nose, which was streaming blood. He stared at me, dragging himself away painfully, his wounded hand useless, cradled in his lap.

“What. The. Fuck.”

“Sorry…I…they’re gone?”

He shook his head. “You turned into a
wolf.
”

Somehow I was less concerned that he and I were having the same hallucination than the fact that he seemed to believe it. That increased my panic. I shook my head, rearranged my clothes as best I could without seeming too nervous. Time to leave.

Terror filled his eyes. His back hit the wall; he couldn’t get any farther from me. “What
are
you?”

“I’m…”
I’m really scared.
“I’m…I’m…late. Gotta go.”

Then I got up and ran away, hard as I could.

I got home, sneaked past my mother, and stripped off my remaining clothes. I got into the shower, as hot as I could bear, and scrubbed off all the blood. Then I turned it all the way to cold until I knew I was neither drunk nor dreaming.

I stared at myself in the mirror. Nothing unusual there: bloodshot eyes, bad haircut, lips faintly blue from the cold shower. I was shivering, too, but that was nothing to do with temperature.

I stuffed the torn clothes into a bag and threw it into the back of my closet. I didn’t want my mother to find bloody, torn clothing. I went to sleep.

At the time, it was easiest to ignore it all, write it off as a bad alcohol experience. After that I had three choices. I could either hide the Beast, stifling it with beer and dope, shutting the door that had opened unasked. Or I could tell someone I thought I turned into a wolf when threatened, then probably eat the leather strap while that someone jabbed my brain with a cattle prod. The third choice was even less palatable.

I could remove my dangerous self from the equation altogether.

For the next several years, until I graduated high school, I made it my mission to become the calmest teenager in history. It wasn’t easy; my sudden interest in the occult and ancient history wasn’t the most direct path to the Kingdom of Cool. Vodka and pot became my best friends; I was too scared to try anything stronger, afraid it would unleash the Beast forever. The reputation as a stoner was marginally preferable to that of a target. The bad days were when I had to pull up my hood and keep my head down to keep the fangs from showing.

Summoning up all my courage, I tried once, when Ma was cooking, to ask her about any…unusual behavior…in our family. She scowled, but asked like what.

“Uhhh, I dunno. Anger issues? Mood swings? Violence?”

She froze, her face went ashen. “What?”

“I was…just wondering. You know, about family traits. And stuff.” Inspiration struck me. “It came up in biology.”

She tried to replace the lid on the pot, but slipped, hitting the pot at an angle. Spaghetti sauce splashed onto the stove, vivid red against cracked white porcelain. “Why are you asking me this, Zoe?” Her hands were trembling; it took her three tries to turn off the heat.

“Uh…”

“Why is this coming up, all of a sudden?”

Her urgency scared me. I wasn’t about to tell her about my problems, not with this kind of reaction. “Uh, class—?”

She let my lame answer hang there, too caught up in her own thoughts. She wiped up the spill, rinsed out the sponge, and gave me a questioning glance.

“You know we don’t want to run into your father’s family. They’re bad people, nothing but trouble. But you listen to me. You and me, we’re
nothing
like them, do you understand me?
Nothing.
”

She grabbed my shoulders, her fingers still damp. “The only reason I left your father was that he was…in something over his head. He wasn’t a bad person, just…lost. I couldn’t risk you getting caught up in his family’s antics. I work as hard as I can, don’t I? Our life isn’t the greatest, but we have nothing to be ashamed of, do we, Zo?”

No way would I ever say anything about her not working hard enough for us. “No, Ma. I…we don’t. No way.”

“And it’s getting better, slowly but surely. Right?”

“Yeah, Ma.” I let a little exasperation into my words, trying to diffuse the situation, trying to sound like a normal teenager. “I get it. I’m just asking, because of class, that’s all.”

“Yeah, well.” She turned away from me, reached into the cupboard for the box of spaghetti. “Anyone ever says anything different, anyone says anything about your father, you tell me, right?”

“Yeah, Ma. ’Course. I know the drill.”

“OK, then.” She smiled weakly. “Dinner’s in ten, so go ahead and set the table.”

As I got out the plates, somehow I knew Ma wasn’t evading me. She believed everything she was telling me, even if she wasn’t telling me everything she knew. I could tell, in her mind, our life was about keeping on the straight and narrow, about family dysfunction and crime. Not about monsters.

That was the only time I’d tried asking her about the Beast. She’d never seen me when I was in the thrall of the Beast, and I never saw her sprout teeth, so I assumed it was my own exclusive problem.

If others fled, seeking refuge into comic books, fantasy, and arcane books on witchcraft, I devoured them wholesale, hoping I could learn something about myself and the Beast. I don’t know whether I hoped I’d find more like me or find the cure to what I was. A simple, logical explanation would do. All those museums we loitered in—free on Wednesday nights, and warm and full of security guards—they had reproductions of cave-wall paintings and statues of people with animal heads. Or animal bodies with human faces. I thought there must be some connection. I told Ma I was interested in art history and the past because it took me away from the present. The past can’t hurt you, I said. Archaeology did calm me. The focus it demanded kept the Beast away, and, later, the quiet of libraries and labs made me feel safe.

I tried to tackle the problem head-on, though. I read, but there’s only so much useful information a teenager can glean from psychology texts. Worse, the more I learned, the more afraid I became: “psychotic” and “schizophrenic” are terrifying words, especially when you believe they may apply to you. So it was only when I was feeling exceptionally safe—and brave—that I took that direct approach.

I tried twice on my own to talk to a professional. Once, after narrowly avoiding a fight in school, I was sent to a counselor there,
and I got the impression, after two or three mandatory meetings, that I could trust her.

One day I told her I had dreams about being a wolf. About attacking people.

She didn’t laugh. She didn’t mock me. She listened, and after I finished, she asked questions.

I think I eventually might have opened up to her even more, but Ma got one of her feelings, and we moved on the next week.

For a while I began to believe what little the counselor had told me, that the “dreams” were a way for me to feel some control in my unsettled, and sometimes scary, early life. And shortly after, during my first attempt at college, I sucked it up to try another session, but by then I realized: I could talk all I wanted about dreams and urges to violence, but I’d never be able to prove what I was. I had no control over the Beast. I couldn’t
show
anyone.

I canceled the appointment and never tried again.

But it started to get better after that. As I delved into my all-consuming interest in the past, I developed skills, which led me to finding a place where I felt I belonged. I began to wonder if my own personal demon would be banished. It gave me hope then, but now I knew otherwise.

Ma had no reason to doubt me, seven years ago. I’d learned to be a good liar, and thanks to my “research,” I always had a glib, deflective answer. In any case, now I had to obey her last instructions to me.

Up until now, I’d worked awfully hard not to use the word “werewolf” to describe the Beast.

Until my first encounter with my father’s people, I had no idea there really might be others like me.

The day of the funeral was bad. I’d wanted to avoid as much of the public side of mourning as I could, but Ma had friends, other assistants in the dean’s office. So against my every antisocial desire and habit, I let them know about the burial. I hadn’t put anything in the paper because it would only draw my father’s people, which was the last thing I wanted; but if the obit was optional, the death notice was not. I just wanted it all to be over.

I put on my skirt and my one dressy jacket and thought longingly of the vodka bottle that was still one-third full in the box in the kitchen. Not today; fear or anger, not grief, brought the Beast, and I owed it to Ma to do her proud in front of the few people who might have cared about her besides me.

It was a cloudy day that refused to either cool down or actually rain, and I kept telling myself to take it in increments. I drove to the crematorium, no problem. Listening to the polite, nonde-nominational words of the minister I’d only met minutes before and who’d never even seen Ma was harder, but he didn’t screw it up, so I held it together.

Greeting two of the other administrative assistants from her office was tougher than I expected. I didn’t know them well, but they’d genuinely cared about Ma, which broke my heart. With one or two notable exceptions, most of our connections didn’t survive our moves, but in the past few years we’d stayed put while
I finished college. In the last years of Ma’s life, she’d put down tenuous roots.